Strawberry Fields Page 5

  I had yet to see Penny smile; I would ask the nurses.

  Malachy watched every performance from a stool at the end of the front row. And one night, watching Sybil in her magnificence as the queen of the hill country, might he not have wondered: why this nostalgia? For what? A past he had spun out of spider web, fairy wing, the pagan legends anyone could unearth from the saints’ tales? Fables of snakes and sylphs, generations of lost infants? If a nation were to rise again, it must have not only a past, not merely a past, but a future. And so I put aside childish things, he might have said—though not in a day, over the course of several years, after the first failed revolt and after he stopped writing for the theater and began instead an elegy: an elegy for a future republic he did not wish to lose. Penny was with him by then, wife and companion. Penny, whom apocrypha would have it on one occasion received a handgun from fleeing republicans in the streets and slipped it under the fish in her shopping basket, nodding at the uniformed thugs of the empire on the corner as she passed. Malachy dedicated his next collection of poems to her, though the civil war delayed publication, and by the time the book was released, to international if not domestic acclaim, it was commonly known that Penny was going mad.

  Mad—but no one now would use this word, I must find another, clinical perhaps, more appropriate, what would the poet say, what did he? Trances, he said. The most delightful fits, he was said to joke when drinking with friends or hangers-on. According to all accounts, Penny had been badly treated at the home before this one, restrained in bed day and night. Until the patron who now funded the theater the poet had sixty years ago made famous had learned of Penny’s situation through a feminist artist—she’d created out of thousands of papier-mâchéd pages of Malachy’s work an oversized straightjacket, poised wretchedly in a gallery corner and titled Penny—and had sought out medical advice and that of the estate to remedy it. Which had resulted in Penny’s transfer to her current residence. Penny had not been in her own country for decades: after the poet’s death, when her family had first institutionalized her, they had sent her overseas on the recommendation of an American pharmacist cousin. Her father’s decision—though since he succumbed to dementia not long after, some suspect that he comprehended little of the situation. But neither her siblings nor anyone else fought for her return. Perhaps there were bureaucratic obstacles; we might grant them this.

  By my third visit, whenever I entered her room, even when I was only returning from the toilet, Penny would rise to shake my hand. She would not look at me; she looked, I believe, at the pen in my left breast pocket.

  By my fourth visit, she no longer sat in the chair by the window, but on the bed, and gestured toward the nightstand to offer it. I had tired of longhand and now brought my typewriter with me, having confirmed by brief experiment that the noise did not disturb her. At first I used a traveling table I rigged myself, and poorly, so that it collapsed about once an hour—one time so violently that I had to hug the typewriter to my chest, a posture that left me covered with ink, and when my tie then caught on the keys, despite myself I swore. This was the only time I heard Penny laugh.

  Mad? Penny’s right eye was damaged, blood vessels a forbidding golden branching toward the iris. Her eyes—which to my knowledge the poet had never described—were hazel: a ring of brown, ring of green. If you looked her in the eye, she tipped her head sideways.

  Frequently she would flick her right hand up at the waist then sweep it over her head, a girl’s imitation of a dancer. Could she be remembering Sybil? Mocking her, after all these years? Penny was twelve years younger than Sybil, but Sybil had died young, in her fifties, a swift-acting cancer. She had lived to see her legitimate son serve in the parliament of her new nation and her illegitimate son become a musician of great early success and strong communist leanings, in the years since her death known best for the latter.

  Sybil? I said.

  Penny didn’t respond. Though I could not interpret her constant small movements. Left hand tapping her thigh, feet shuffling, often with startling speed for a woman her age. Right hand twisting her hair into a tight ringlet, forefinger caught in its center.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  I extended a hand, but she turned back to the window.

  By my fifth visit it was almost spring, snow receding, first from the depressions that were in fair weather paths between the asylum buildings, now rivulets. In dirtying heaps against the walls snow endured. I wore galoshes to walk from the car, which the head nurse smiled at condescendingly.

  I sat beside Penny at the window. There was no birdsong yet, only wind.

  It is said that her madness was inspiration.

  I typed, then paused.

  Her madness was madness.

  Mad as mad.

  A hornet, a March hare, a wet hen, hell.

  And this was my argument, what would distinguish me. In his 1958 study, Abernathy claimed to have definitively traced lines of the poems of that period to their origins in journals the poet kept of his wife’s Trances (his capitalization; or Trances). Abernathy’s study, originally a monograph discussing solely the long poem “Carousel as Seen by a Cyclist in Motion,” was extended into book length upon further access to the archives, and has been treated as foundational to all subsequent discussion. The tragedy of Penny’s madness redeemed by its inestimable contribution to literature.

  But—not merely literature. For the poet’s progress was the progress of the nation: from the idealistic fervor of his early theatrical work, to the elegiac rigor of his middle period, the stately tumult of his posthumous collection. His maturity the poetic equivalent of beating sword into plowshare: the man’s work had begun, and the man was visionary. The nation could now be seen and heard; within this lifetime the nation would come into being. If words could conjure it, and they would. A few short years after Penny’s first night at the theater, street signs were nailed up bearing the old names, in the old tongue; scholars turned from preservation, huddled over transcribed songs and illumined manuscripts, and wrote children’s textbooks, used first in the west then in the capital. The republicans formed committees, drafting constitutions and labor agreements, to ready the economy for independence. When the colonial forces turned their guns on a crowd at a football match, the next day’s streets were not cowed into silence, but loud even with mothers and children in protest, the threats of strike made good on nationwide, and before the end of the week twelve of the empire’s top men in the city had been assassinated, by bomb, by gun, in one case a knife wielded by his own tailor.

  The archives of the colonial parliamentary committee meetings attest: they knew they were staring down the barrel. The days of the order they’d always known were ending. They thought no longer of how they might prevail but what might be borne away with them in their routing. Not least our dignity, not least our lives—as the famous line would have it, exclaimed behind closed doors by the prime-minister-to-be.

  Who could not see that the time had come?

  Penny?

  And isn’t this the question upon which everything relies? Was she visionary—how clearly she could see the new nation, her mind gone in the light of the city on the hill—or was she blind? Soothsayer, or mere babbler? Her words flotsam or the surf’s very pounding, through which the poet could hear the moon?

  Others tell us of Penny’s speech, name it a torrent, inconceivable chaos. But the poet claimed to transcribe all she would say in her spells. What he called the truth of the Trance, or Truth. She talked, her sister said in an interview, my God, did she talk; but her sister rarely visited, having married determinedly into the bourgeoisie and since then having been mocked by Malachy every time she opened her mouth. Other scholars have attempted to locate the couple’s servants from the time, but these interviews have yielded no further insight into the manifestation of Penny’s illness, the substance, as it were, of her insanity, material of the vital discourse. The p
oet hailed her speech as the mother-tongue. “It is in these Trances,” he wrote, “that she attains the higher state of being to which we may only aspire.”

  But is this statement not perfectly bland?

  Is it not the least persuasive line in the body of his writing?

  One cannot ignore—though others have minimized—the terrible incident. The theater was closed and the civil war in its sickening final months. The best of that generation of revolutionaries were dead, put to death by the empire or, the last, the greatest, the leader the nation deserved: ambushed in the hills and shot between shed and barn by his own countrymen. The hero fallen, and what would become of the state whose dream he had bled? In these months, the nation destroying itself from within, no books forthcoming and creditors clamoring, the poet had implored Penny not to go to her family for money—the sister whom he despised, the traitorous father who would work for the shipping masters until the day they fled with their wives and children—but to take on work, light sewing or laundry, to help pay the bills. Yet her illness must already have been progressing; he had been noting his concerns in his daybook for months, and his sister Margaret’s letters to him spoke of little else. “There is a strange cast to Penny,” the sculptor and anarchist known as Dragoman, who was living in exile and spent much of those years among the poet’s circle, had written. “She rarely looks at anyone or thing, but is to be found mothlike drawn to the window, and answers questions only after they are repeated three or four times, or her husband goes to her and asks them again in his own voice. Malachy does not seem distressed, but arranges himself at the windowsill beside her, hardly interrupting his own tirades, but holding her hand between his own; inevitably her gaze floats again to the window, even in the dark. At night one awakes to a murmur rising through the floor, through the bowels of the house, that I believe is her speech.” (This a passage I had read in no other study; Dragoman kept his journals in a devilish blend of English and his native Cyrillic-based dialect, which has only recently been authoritatively translated.) Some have suggested, without condemnation, that the poet did not send Penny to her family for money because he feared they might notice her illness and involve themselves; naturally he distrusted them. Fortunately, their financial crisis was averted: an American paper requested an occasional poem from him upon the ambush of the rebel hero that was the nadir of the civil war. This led to other commissions, and soon a collection was accepted by the Boston house Hayworth & Brent.

  It is not that my argument is original: in his three-volume biography Gideon too suspects that the poet’s records of Penny’s speech are fabrications; thus she was more puppet than muse. Yet to him this suspicion is of little consequence. (We may almost envy Gideon his chauvinism: he is the only biographer who does not dedicate more pages to Sybil than Penny, but dispenses efficiently with both.)

  But I—I who pass these hours with Penny—shall prove this suspicion to be sea change, a thread that when pulled unweaves the tapestry. Malachy’s diaries of her Trances, those Abernathy claims as the wellspring of his greatest poems—I shall establish each word in them is Malachy’s, there is no trace of Penny. Their spiraling metaphors, distinct syntax, insistent iambs: his and his alone. That he claimed otherwise is evidence merely of a last myth he would offer and cannot be cited as proof. She spoke; but if we have only his testimony of what she said, we have nothing.

  Which brings me here and makes a fool of me. Thinking it might suffice, to bring a pen like his, a typewriter of the same model, draw near to her and wait. When I was warned that she has not uttered a word in years. With no particular concern the nurses affirm this.

  Penny—if her speech was no prophecy, what was it? How may we know the river of her mind, by whose banks a man composed? A land and a people extending in every direction and breaking into dawn. For if the words were his, hers are lost, a dream of wind or stone. The man who claimed to be vessel of revelation offered only himself, robed in lore, a costume to deceive the ages.

  What Penny thought of him, poised beside her, notebook in hand, we do not know. If he ever endeavored to listen.

  The civil war ends. The poet’s politics—now funded in their expression by his American publisher, whose enthusiastic young editor (later the most eminent in the Boston literary scene) wrote him weekly whether there was business or not—began to harden. He moved toward the center-left position for which he would be criticized by the upcoming generation of radicals and writers, those singing the praises—for a time, before the bombings intensified—of the burgeoning guerrilla movement then beginning its first series of strikes in the north. The poet’s youthful soft spot for anarchism would become, I will establish, merely aesthetic, of no political value, sentimental as his love for a madwoman.

  Penny was barefoot in the gardens, Penny was under the stairs, her voice a fretful echo in the floorboards. If you hadn’t seen her in hours, you could whistle for the dog, and he would lead you to her. Penny sat outside the army barracks in the village, with a basket of sewing—this the most famous story, like the others unproved. Sybil could come by the house and Penny would not know her to despise her; they could walk together barefoot, the poet watching from his study window.

  Write again for the theater, Sybil would argue with him.

  I will not write if you will not act, he replied, though this was not the reason.

  I no longer read M’s poems, Sybil wrote in her diary: when the urge comes over me, just as I’ve gotten into bed, to pick up the volumes of his I still keep treasured, instead I turn to the most recent treatises of the Agrarian Socialist Movement, and I am soothed, and I sleep.

  How pretty your poems are, Sybil said to him, at dinner one night, their last great public spat, not long after the birth of her second son. What a pretty commonwealth we must have. You must—and with this in his daybook he claims she seized his tie and flicked it against his chin—have all your coats laundered regularly, to be sure the blood of our martyrs hasn’t spattered upon you, you do like to stand so close and watch.

  For some time I had thought the poet invented this incident, so vividly did he recount it. But I have now discovered a letter, from a journalist present that night, and perhaps Sybil’s lover, that confirms it in every detail.

  By my sixth visit, Penny will fall asleep in my presence, waking only when I stop typing. She sleeps in her chair, spittle shining on the shoulder of her dressing gown. The bulbs are coming up, the first few, which will have to suffer at least one more frost.

  On my seventh and eighth visits, I bring the others’ biographies with me, the whole stack. I read aloud to Penny every chapter about her. I think her humming may grow louder, or more monotonous. I read the chapters about Malachy’s childhood, since perhaps there are things she may never have known. I read a few of the poems from his last collection, published posthumously: she was reportedly too sick to have read them.

  By my ninth visit, when I open a book, Penny lies down, her head at the foot of the bed, near me. I read her the newspaper: in the north of her country a car bomb has been detonated, downtown in a suburb, not by the jail or courthouse, but by the shops, the bus stop. Fourteen policemen have been assassinated in the last year, latest count. Most of the leaders of the new resistance, the most ardent young men, are now in prison, where it’s said they wake and sleep covered in their own feces, and sculpt the food they are given into rot on the walls. Their hair grows long and is forcibly cut from them; they are beaten and hosed clean of the excrement in which they have clothed themselves, demanding political recognition, the full panoply of rights. The old tongue has faded again, I tell her, is used only in signs for tourists. I offer her a handful of postcards of the west country beaches, where she and the poet traveled in their youth, when she still had her health and the revolutionaries still had ties to tenant farmers and the collectivization efforts underway in those days. Penny has fallen asleep. I leave the postcards on the windowsill. What we lack now is a
poet, I say upon closing the newspaper, and imagine her reply.

  Alice

  The investigation was going nowhere. If Modigliani thought otherwise, he didn’t let on. There were no arrests, no signs of progress, and the official interviews had gone into reruns. Leads the cops reassured us of in statements seemed to end there. As far as I could tell it was just Modigliani hitting the pavement.

  What I’m saying is, there was no story. A fact it was hard to believe but each day confirmed. I had profiles of the victims, tons of background. In my notes I used their first names, hoping to call them up, make them feel known: Kareem, Frances, Jonathan, Sergei, Diana. I’d looked into the PTSD study. Compared it, in methodology and results, as far as I could assess, with studies around the state and country. Nothing of note. I started working on VA hospital stats, but that path was well-trod. I went back to Xenith.